The present invention concerns a box that may be opened, useful in particular for sheet material and such that the opening of the box lip, for simple removal of a cover member permits complete accessibility to the whole contents of the box.
It is known that to package sheet material there are utilized cardboard box containers, having a bottom and an upper closing part that may be opened. However, when the packing is opened, that is by opening the upper closing part, in order to have access to the packing content, it will be necessary to break or gut the box sides, with remarkable waste of time and discomfort. In addition, by opening it in this way, the container can no longer be reutilized. In some instances, in addition to the above-mentioned problem there is also the fact that the content of the box or package is generally somewhat heavy (whenever, for instance, form packages are involved), and has to be fed as such to machines, for example accounting or computing center printing machines, copying machines, etc., whereby the content of the package (or its residues) must be quickly eliminated or emptied before "processing" the content.
OBJECTS AND SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The main purpose of the present invention is that of providing a box that may be opened to make the content readily accessible in its entirety.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a box that will be readily and integrally reutilizable for successive packing operations.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a box that may be opened and will be of simple structure and economical to manufacture.
These and other purposes are obtained by means of a box that may be opened, including a containing body and a cover member adapted to fit on the containing body mouth, characterized in that the walls of the containing body consist in at least four panels, independent of one another and united along one of their base sides to the common bottom of the box, whereby the panels are divided among themselves through slits corresponding to the corners of the box.
According to the preferred embodiment of the invention, the cover member is shaped to completely encompass the lateral surface of the box, and of a height that corresponds to the height of the box, so that on one side removal of the cover releases the box and permits pulling down of the lateral panels until they become substantially coplanar with the bottom; the box is thus reduced to a flat structure which can be easily extracted from the bottom of the packing content and reutilized as such for other further packagings.
In turn, the cover member is closed at its upper part an enclosure having edges that can be restrained among themselves, so that the cover member, once extracted from the box-type container, can also be substantially flattened along a plane passing through two opposed corners and reutilized.
While the above-mentioned embodiment serves the purpose of providing the box with sufficient mechanical resistance for the stacking of many packages for the handling by pallets it is possible to provide the cover member high enough that the lateral panels of the box are kept united.
In accordance with another embodiment, the closing member of the box consist of angle sections, slidably engaging the corners of the box being angle sections united with one another with diagonally placed cross members that may serve the purpose of keeping the contents of the box in place.